[Egypt] A day in Manshiyat Naser, Cairo's "Garbage City"

Spent a day walking around Manshiyat Naser, a neighborhood on the edge of Cairo. It's home to the Zabbaleen — around 60,000 Coptic Christians who've been collecting and recycling the city's trash for generations. The men drive out into Cairo in the morning and bring the garbage back. The women sort it in the courtyards. Organic stuff feeds the pigs, everything else gets sold to factories. Some families have small processing workshops right inside their buildings.

The place looks pretty rough, you're literally walking on piles of trash, but the people were the friendliest I met anywhere in Cairo. Women sitting in the courtyards sorting trash, playing music from a speaker, chatting with each other. Men after a long day sitting in cafes, playing backgammon, smoking shisha, laughing. When you walk up to them they shake your hand and say "welcome, brother." One of them offered to show me his workshop — took me inside, showed me how he shreds plastic into flakes and presses it into bricks, and then took me into another room where he keeps a cow. Stood there beaming like "look, it's a cow." Another guy just walked with me for about an hour and gave me his own tour of the street. Kids, when they catch you looking, start waving, grinning, asking your name, showing off how hard they can kick a ball against a wall.

And in the middle of all this, normal life is going on. There are shops and markets and fruit stands. One guy was walking around with a basket of fresh bread, selling it to the workers. Another was walking around with an armful of pink balloons, handing them out to the kids.

Also, this was the only neighborhood in Cairo where nobody tried to sell me anything, pull me into a shop, or ask for a tip. Everywhere else in the city it happens constantly. In Manshiyat Naser people would just say "welcome, brother" and leave me alone.

If you're in Cairo and don't mind walking through a place that looks rough, go. For me it was more interesting than the pyramids.